Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often.

Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising.

But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.

This isn't the first time I've said this but also had an early-career job writing Perl code. And I actually got to the point where I liked it -- I mean I could see why it had a following.

Subsequently I've written code in almost every popular programming language and I will frequently go years between languages but even so I have very little trouble picking them back up. Even C++. But not Perl. It's just so weird with so many idiosyncrasies that I just can't remember it.

Perl was also my first productive language, and I do miss it a little. Write something like []string{"foo", "bar", "baz"} in go and you really appreciate qw(foo bar baz). Perl was always designed to be easy to type in, and maybe not so easy to maintain later. Good memories, but not for me anymore.

Agreed!

I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.

I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.

More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.

https://paulgraham.com/power.html

I'm having to write a lot more perl at work than I would prefer to. It's still poetry, I suppose, but mostly of the bathroom-stall variety.

I discovered Perl directly after PHP before Web 2.0 days. Compared with the extreme, Java or (contemporary) Go, Perl codes (can) have a soul. Interestingly, modern ECMAScript (JS) brought in a few of the nice breweties from Perl world which I haven't seen a long time.

Please show me an example of Perl that looks beautiful.

I don't believe you.